IE8 and JScript

As Dean mentioned yesterday in his post announcing the availability of the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for developers , better script performance is of particular interest to the developer community. In conjunction with Dean’s announcement, the JScript Team posted additional information around scripting improvements in IE8 Beta 1 over on their team blog. I encourage you to check it out and follow their blog to learn more about the cool things they are doing for IE8!

Anyway, better performances are always welcome, and it’s nice to see IE is about to get what sounds like its best version yet, by far and on every point.

However, IE8 is still very much behind competitors when it comes to JS performances. On the other hand, IE8 is so early in development that comparing it to Firefox 3, for example, which is almost ready, isn’t really fair. So let’s wait and see how much better IE8 will get.

Speed looks to be about %50 of I.E. 7.0. Homepage banner won’t run on 64 bit ver. of Vista, glad to see MS moving in more positive direction. If this gets out, maybe it will cancel some of the distrust voiced in the user community. Hurry, (but not too much of hurry) we need this.

I would like to know why, even though you are praising yourselves for a job well done, IE8 Beta 1 seems to be slower running JS than even IE7? Code that rain kind of slow and sluggish (especially small animated elements) run even slower and are more sluggish in IE8. Aditionally, pages that include both flash and js elements slow each other down significantly. This does not occur in other browsers, all other browsers run code very quickly and smoothly. Why?

Jim, I’d guess that the speed improvements in the JScript engine are being offset by the not-yet-optimized new layout engine. I’ve seen some noticeable perf improvements when using the Emulate IE7 button, so once they get a chance to finish & tune the new layout engine, the overall experience should be faster than IE7 itself.

@Jim – IE8 BETA 1. BETA. BETA. BEEEE-TAH. In other words it still has internal debugging code. Non-optimized engine. Don’t complain about speed until maybe Beta 3 or RC1. Then it’s open season on speed. But as it’s not, it’s Beta 1, speed optimizations are near the bottom of the list.

Code that rain kind of slow and sluggish (especially small animated elements) run even slower and are more sluggish in IE8. Aditionally, pages that include both flash and js elements slow each other down significantly. This does not occur in other browsers, all other browsers run code very quickly and smoothly. Why?

Mozilla Links has an article about the Firefox ultimate feature – Performance, in which they compare the JavaScript performance on different web browsers. Firefox 3 beta 4 as some really impressive Ja…

I’m genuinely excited about all of the substantial changes to IE8. However, I am pretty disappoint to learn that IE8 does support the powerful and useful array methods that other browsers have had for some time. Since Web developers spend a lot of time iterating collections of nodes, I was looking forward to having a native implementation of array.foreach, but that hasn’t been implemented. I was also hoping for array methods such as map, filter, indexOf, etc. These are methods that would add tremendous value to IE8 as a development platform. Without them, we would remain dependent on JavaScript libraries to implement what other browsers have natively, which will mean IE8 will lag in performance in that respect.